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Thursday, February 9, 2017

Trump’s Other Ban

Trump’s
travel ban and his rightwing Supreme Court pick are troubling in themselves,
but they are also serving to deflect attention away from the plot by the
administration and its Republican allies to undermine the regulation of
business.

Surprisingly
little is being said about Trump’s January 30executive
orderinstructing federal
agencies to identify two prior regulations for elimination for each new rule
they seek to issue. It also dictates that the total incremental cost of new
rules (minus the cost of repealed ones) should not exceed zero for the year.

While
Trump’s appointees will probably not propose much in the way of significant new
rules that would have to be offset, the order amounts to a ban on additional
regulation.

It
boosts the long-standing effort by corporate apologists to delegitimize
regulation by focusing on the number of rules and their supposed cost while
ignoring their social benefits.

Meanwhile,
the regulation bashers are also busy on Capitol Hill. Republicans have
resurrected the rarely used Congressional Review Act as a mechanism for undoing
the Obama Administration’s environmental regulations as well as its Fair Pay
and Safe Workplaces executive order concerning federal contractors.

Both
Trump and Congressional Republicans are also targeting the Dodd-Frank law that
enhanced financial regulation after the 2008 meltdown. Calling the law a
“disaster,” Trump recently said “we’re going to be doing a big number on
Dodd-Frank,” adding: “The American dream is back.”

If
Trump was referring to the aspirations of the wolves of Wall Street, then that
dream may indeed be in for a resurgence. For much of the rest of the
population, the consequences would be a lot less pleasant.

To
take just one example, an attack on Dodd-Frank would certainly include an
assault on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created by the law
and which has aggressively gone after financial predators.

As
Violation Trackershows,
during the past five years the agency has imposed more than $7 billion in
penalties in around 100 enforcement actions against banks, payday lenders,
credit card companies and others. Its $100 million fine against Wells Fargo
last September brought attention to the bank’s bogus-account scheme.

The
CFPB has not let the election results impede its work. Since November 8 it has
announced more than a dozen enforcement actions with penalties totaling more
than $80 million.

The
largest of those involves Citigroup, two of whose subsidiaries werefined$28.8 million for keeping borrowers in
the dark about options to avoid foreclosure and burdening them with excessive
paperwork demands when they applied for foreclosure relief.

Citigroup,
one of the companies that has the most to gain from restrictions on the CFPB
and Dodd-Frank in general, has shown up often as I have been collecting data on
recent enforcement cases from various agencies for a Violation Tracker update
that will be released soon.

The
Securities and Exchange Commission recentlyannouncedthat Citigroup Global Markets would
pay $18.3 million to settle allegations that it overcharged at least 60,000
investment advisory clients with unauthorized fees.

In
a separate SECcase, Citi had to
pay $2.96 million to settle allegations that it misled investors about a
foreign exchange trading program.

Around
the same time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commissionfiled and settled(for $25 million) allegations that Citigroup
Global Markets engaged in the illicit practice of spoofing — bidding or
offering with the intent to cancel the bid or offer before execution — in U.S.
Treasury futures markets and that it failed to diligently supervise the
activities of its employees and agents in conjunction with the spoofing orders.

Citi’s
record, along with that of other rogue banks, undermines the arguments of
Dodd-Frank foes and in fact makes the case for stricter oversight. Yet the
reality of financial misconduct is about to be overwhelmed by a barrage of
alternative facts about the magic of deregulation.

Update: After this piece
was written, Congress voted to repeal another provision of Dodd-Frank known as
Cardin-Lugar or Section 1504, which required publicly traded extractive
companies to report on payments to foreign governments in their SEC filings.
The disclosure was meant as an anti-corruption measure.

Thought for the day

Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!

Individual One’s tweet at 4:52 AM - 17 Feb 2019 after a long, hard day of playing golf at Mar-A-Lago on Day Two of our “national emergency.”

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